Kerala's IT park Technopark will become the country's largest on February 22 when Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan inaugurates a 720,000 sq ft building, taking total built up area in the campus to 2.2 million sq ft.

The new building called Tejeshwani has 12 floors and is believed to be the single largest building in the IT industry in the country.

The Technopark campus, 12 km from Thiruvananthapuram, presently has 1.5 million sq ft built up area with 110 companies operating with 15,000 employees.

After February 22, Technopark would push ITPL Bangalore to second place and Tidal Park in Chennai to third.

"This is not the end. In the course of the year, three companies are building their own campus in Thiruvananthapuram and would have a total of 800,000 sq ft. The Mumbai-based Leela Group is also building their campus here and would have 500,000 sq ft," said M Vasudevan, business manager of Technopark.

"In the next three months time, 6,000 new jobs would be created," Vasudevan said.

NeST sources told The Hindu here that this was announced during the visit of president of the TMSC Masamichi Katsurada to the Offshore software Development Centre (ODC) that the NeST is operating for TMSC at the NeST campus at Technopark here on Thursday.

They said the partnership between the NeST and the TMSC had begun at a modest scale way back in 2003 when NeST started operating the ODC for TMSC, with 30 software professionals.

The number of software professionals rose up to 220 late last year and has now increased to 300. They will be developing software for Toshiba's next generation of medical imaging equipments. The number of software professionals working at the ODC will go up to 400 by the end of 2007, NeST sources said. A NeST press release quoted the visiting president of the TMSC as having said: "We are truly impressed by the quality and technical standards set by NeST engineers. Over the years this ODC has been surprising us with its offshore delivery capability both in terms of quality and scalability. We look forward to NeST's valuable support as our relationship enters a critical phase of major expansion."